HPE ProLiant DL Servers Reviews

These are very reliable servers with a great warranty. Also, the price was very attractive. We required a complex solution for our organization in terms of hardware, software, and VMware implementations. These servers fit in quite well with our architecture.

A few years ago, we had a project for virtualizing all our servers. We chose HP products, services, and storage, including ProLiant servers, for this project. It worked out very well.

The software doesn't allow you to view isolated hardware issues. This needs to be improved.

We've been using them for more than 10 years.

We have no problems with deployment.

I don't think we've had any issues with stability.

It scales for our needs.

Technical support is very knowledgable.

The flexibility of using storage options would be one valuable feature. Another would be competitive pricing. And yet another would the quite high top speeds on the processor.

It's also the simplicity and user friendliness that's important to us. The only issues we've had were software related from our own side, but not from HP.

The provisioning is something you want to do regardless of the actual types of hardware that you use as you want it as wide as possible.

We use the DL380 mainly for our workloads, so it's a combination of having to use local storage but also having high demands in terms of top speed on processors. We're using the highest top speed possible in a DL380. With that on the local discs, we get lots of performance where other systems will connect to a traditional SAN-based storage.

You would lose speed there, so we use the product for these high workloads, but we also use products like the 380 or the 360 for workloads that are actually offsite. These are like our smaller data centers where we don't have virtualization. These are branch offices or could be used as a domain controller for Windows, those sorts of workloads.

We'd like to have a management platform that's not limited and that would give us a single view of all our systems. This full range of options is limited only to certain types of hardware.

Also, if you look at compatible infrastructure that was introduced recently, it will be like an image streamer in a compatible system. An image streamer won't be able to provision older types of servers.

It's my job to design the infrastructure of the RAM. If there's any operational issue, I would be the one calling HP for that.

We've looked at a lot of IBM systems as well as Lenovo and Dell. We also looked at converged systems like Nutanix.

Look for performance specs. There's a lot of high-end servers being sold in the market with quite low specs.

• Reliability
• Scalability
• Performance

These products are used as corporate infrastructure servers and improve our ability to perform everyday tasks crucial to our business as well as allow for easy administration from an IT perspective.

As these servers are constantly evolving with better technology and performance, I would have nothing to offer in the way of a wish list feature additions.

I've used it for five years.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

It's excellent.

It's excellent.

This product was installed prior to my employment, but I have used servers from HP in the past and have always been satisfied with them.

The initial setup was very straightforward with a step-by-step wizard to help me get the servers configured quickly. I’m especially impressed with the RAID setup wizard which makes setup of complex disk pools a breeze.

I implemented one of the servers myself all the way through. The others in our environment were setup by Microsoft prior to my employment

The ROI with these servers if fairly quick. Their reliability and uptime provide a quick return.

I would highly recommend purchasing an HP server product

• Scalability
• Performance
• Out-of-band management
• Support

Java version dependence for its out-of-band management. This is also an issue for other vendors, as well.

HP Proliant Servers have been used on this project for over six years. I’ve managed them since I came on the project, so for almost five years. We used the BladeSystem alongside the DL servers.

There won't be any issues as long as you have followed the guidelines to ensure that the firmware was up to date prior to deployment.

There was an issue before I came on the project, where a firmware update was not applied, and that had caused a few systems to become unstable under certain conditions, but HP support was able to identify the cause and provide a solution.

The systems scale well for our environment.

Mostly very positive. The only issue I’ve encountered has been with presales support (i.e. getting accurate quotes to purchase systems).

Excellent.

Before coming on this project, I had used Dell servers. The performance of the HP server has an edge over the Dell systems I had used.

Overall the HP Proliant servers have been dependable and fit nicely into the price vs performance that is required for custom application stack.

HP Proliant servers are rock solid and when you need technical support HP’s team is there to support you with answers, no matter how long it takes to properly identify the root cause and then propose a solution.

• It helps with work-load management
• It's a reliable solution
• It's easy to fix
• It's easy to work with and manage

I have never implemented them as part of an organization, but I worked with these rack servers while providing support for customers.

During the period of time I was providing tech support for this product line, I was able to see that its fault tolerance is really high, providing the capability of a reaction against a “disaster” and the failure rate is really low.

Obviously, you will still have hardware failures, but it is not something you can easily fix. This is more about the regular hardware failures that you may get on daily basis such as a bad HDD, NIC failure or regular hardware failures that may be present due to the normal workload of the server, meaning that they have or exceeded the lifetime or they are presenting a huge workload.

Regarding the normal functionality of the server as is, the only improvement I would say is to continue with the research and the development of higher workload capacities as the customer needs are constantly growing, therefore the demand for what the product requires to do will also grow, to avoid the demand to elapse behind the improving of the technology needs to be continued. It's tied to the needs of the end users and any new features that they would require in order to better manage their organizations.

I’ve worked with these products for over three years providing technical support for the HP ISS industry customers. I did not need to use them in a production environment.

I was part of the technical support team.

I used to guide customers with the installation, and the initial setup was always straightforward.

• Different form factors
• Small footprint
• Good compromise between pricing schema and available options
• Support and care packs add-ons

The product fits well between tight budgets and horizontal expansions.

More options beyond the ROM configurations for High Power computing and ULV (Ultra Low Voltage) deployments.

I've used the ProLiant servers since 2005.

The G6 was not a stable product.

If you had a Care Pack in place, the support was 9/10. In case you were left with no Care Pack, the best-effort option was worth nothing.

Many times the setup had to be agreed and consulted with HP representatives and technical after-sales staff.

Implementation was done in-house although physical installation was done through the vendor, as it was included in the price. When HP sent their consultants or staff to do the job, things moved faster. You should invest in your partners’ professional education MORE.

We consider ROI on not more than 24 months for our business cases, and hardware turnover on a three years basis. HP pricing and licensing schemas fitted well into our agendas.

Yes, we looked at equivalent products from SUN/Oracle and IBM. We chose HP for specific deployments and pricing comparison.

The HP SmartArray, as this takes care of RAID rebuilding.

I've used 350 disks, had eight disk replacements, and two controllers over three years.

Better power usage monitoring would be nice.

I used it for three years.

When replacing RAID card in the server one must re-install the license for ADG/RAID6.

No issues encountered.

We increased the amount of shelves per server to six, and we have had no issues.

Great, it's just an e-mail.

It's good, but their on-site is not familiar with this setup.

We had a mixture of Sun Thor and HP C-class with AMS FC storage from Hitachi.

It went fine, and it even came pre-installed with RHEL, however, we reinstalled it with SL.

We did it in-house.

It works fine, it gave quite a lot of storage per rack unit. There are better options for storage density these days. Also, there are better options for more storage per rack unit, and more CPU power.

With x86 hardware, a lot of it is the same. The value goes back to HP's willingness to partner and HP having a roadmap for the x86 platform.

No issues with stability or other major issues.

No issues with stability or other major issues.

HP is a market leader for scalability and additions.

Support has been helpful. Both customer and technical support have been very responsive to help make things right.

It was a market shift into x86 hardware and more commodity-based hardware.

Initial setup was straightforward.

• IBM
• Lenovo
• Dell

We chose HP because they had the right combination of factors and willingness to partner.

Reliability, support, and performance. A roadmap for where they are going in the future is important. We have that with HP.